Little Review

The sixties are sexy again in the latest issue of the Believer, which gives new life to the moribund genre of boomer kitsch by exporting it to Yugoslavia. A bonus DVD presenting the short films of Slovenian director Karpo Godina manages to stimulate in all the right ways, featuring floppy-haired boys and sunny-looking girls in varying states of cinematic experimentation. In “The Gratinated Brains of Pupilija Ferkeverk,” the camera cuts back and forth between avant-garde magazine covers and a swing set which stands on a flooded plane and is intermittently visited by abstract arrangements of half-naked, drugged-out youths. A note in the magazine reveals that several of the films were banned by censors “on the mere suspicion” that they “contained subversive hidden messages.” Budding revolutionaries might not find much inspiration here, but makers of Levi’s ads should take note.

The black market for books is big business in Peru, where street hawkers rake in $52 million a year and pirate presses employ a larger workforce than the legitimate publishing industry. As Daniel Alarcón reports in the winter issue of Granta, Lima’s larger “informal” manufacturers can churn out forty thousand volumes a week, drowning the country in contraband and sending rogue exemplars as far as La Paz and Buenos Aires. Struggling writers, for their part, want to get pirated—it’s a sign they’ve arrived. Instead of resorting to Metallica-style moralizing, Alarcón navigates the murky waters of Peruvian publishing with open-minded charm. A book-pirate, he observes, can be a cultural Robin Hood, stealing from “elitist multinational publishers” and bringing literature to the poor. In Peru’s case, though, the politics get tricky: Lima’s knock-off boom didn’t really get going until the nineteen-nineties, when President Alberto Fujimori declared open season on publishers in an effort to depress the sales of his one-time electoral opponent, the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa. Alarcón, whom the Book Bench interviewed last May, has a personal stake in this material, which is closer to sociopolitical memoir than straight reportage. There’s no moral here, which is how we know we’re being told the truth.

What’s wrong with the kids today? Mostly careerism and Twitter, says Bill Deresiewicz in the spring issue of the American Scholar. Following up on his widely-circulated 2008 essay “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education,” Deresiewicz’s latest assault on the callow meritocracy rather ingeniously combines two popular narratives: that today’s youth are “world-class hoop-jumpers,” and that we should blame Facebook. Much as a previous generation of curmudgeons liked to rail against sex and drugs, contemporary scolds seem to have seized upon social media technology as the chief corruptor of the young. Instead of leaders, we get networkers; instead of big ideas, Google trends. A generation that spends so little time alone can only hope to produce “excellent sheep.”

Christopher Glazek, a freelance magazine writer, is the founder of the Yale AIDS Memorial Project.